The second annual FABRIC Arts Festival will return this month to Fall River in a virtual hybrid form due to the novel coronavirus.
From concerts, pre-recorded in Portugal, being projected on Government Center to “walking encounters” on the Quequechan River Trail, the festival’s curators and organizers are still looking to create a unique arts and cultural experience for the community even amid the pandemic.
“Everything has been impacted by COVID. We’ve been challenged to find new formats for everything,” said Jesse James, a Lisbon-based artist who is once again helping to develop the programming for this year’s FABRIC festival.
“Something that was clear to us from the beginning, especially in this moment of crisis, is that we need culture as a way to create perspectives and to understand what’s happening around us,” James said.
The festival is scheduled to take place Oct. 16-17. The Casa dos Açores da Nova Inglaterra has been organizing the event, which will feature public art, music, workshops, guided walks, and presentations.
James, joined by fellow Portuguese artists Sofia Carolina Botelho and António Pedro Lopes, is curating the festival, which will be centered mainly in downtown Fall River and the Quequechan River Trail.
Inspired by similar avante-garde, contemporary festivals in the Azores and continental Portugal, FABRIC is intended to showcase local artists, lift up Fall River’s architectural and cultural heritage while forging new links between the local community and the country that many in the city’s Portuguese diaspora immigrated from decades ago.
“We felt FABRIC was an amazing opportunity for us to update our visions of each other,” said James, who noted that the culture and arts scene in the Azores especially have significantly changed since older generations of Portuguese immigrants left the islands in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“Portugal is now a very progressive country in its relationship to culture and design,” James said. “FABRIC is about creating an updated idea and perspective on what each place is, but also as the name indicates, it’s not only for the Portuguese community in Fall River. It’s for everyone.”
Michael Benevides, a Fall River resident and owner of Portugalia Marketplace who is one of FABRIC’s lead organizers, said he thought about the possibility of the city hosting the kind of music and arts festivals that he had seen in recent years while visiting Sao Miguel in the Azores.
“We had to do a festival in Fall River that embodied what makes Fall River, Fall River,” Benevides said. “That includes understanding mill culture, fabrics, how things are made… The curator team came in with this outside lens into Fall River. Together they’ve done an assessment of what’s here in terms of arts and culture.”
Before last year’s first FABRIC festival, James said he visited Fall River to “scout” the city and get ideas for the festival’s format, in the process meeting with local talent agents and spending time at Portugalia Marketplace to understand how people here relate to each other.
“We’ve heard so much about these places,” said James, adding that people in the Azores often speak of the region encompassing New Bedford and Fall River as “The Tenth Island” since many of them have family in this area.
“I’ve always been interested in how these communities in the diaspora left the Azores, how they related to their new geographies, what their perspectives are, how they look back at the Azores, and how those in the Azores today look at those communities,” James said.
Benevides said the pre-recorded concerts that will be projected on Government Center will be visible from afar, so people will not have to congregate in one location to enjoy the shows. He added that the festival will include “performative,” guided urban walks in the mornings and afternoons open to no more than five people.
Meanwhile, the ground floor of the Merrow building on Bedford Street will be converted into a gallery space showcasing artists with connections to Greater Fall River. An “apparition” of a waterfall – a nod to the city’s past – will be projected onto Government Center.
“This is a global arts approach to our community,” Benevides said. “Last year, we had people who came to FABRIC walking away from Fall River saying, ‘Wow, that was an interesting format and this is a really interesting town.’ It’s nice to bring people in who haven’t experienced something like this before.”
For more information on the FABRIC Arts Festival, visit www.fabricfallriver.com
Video Courtesy FABRIC Arts Festival
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